The ongoing development, maintenance, and expansion of air traffic control systems involve an increasing number of unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous aerial vehicles, and drones (collectively referred to as UAVs). To that end, it is important to insure that such UAVs are positively identified and immune from hacking and spoofing.
Lacking sufficient safeguards, someone seeking to steal commercial goods could equip an UAV with false identification marking or signals, pick up a load of cargo belonging to someone else, and deliver the load to any location in range, effectively stealing the load. Surveillance UAVs could be misused by a person either by falsely commanding another person's UAV to go to an unintended location or by commanding their own UAV to go to an unauthorized location. People who object to UAV operations could jam or falsify UAV command streams, causing them to crash. People could hijack UAVs, swap their payloads with dangerous materials, and pilot the UAV to any location in the guise of being a something innocuous, such as a pizza delivery. Accordingly, systems and methods are desired to minimize these and other threats.
In accordance with common practice various features shown in the drawings may not be drawn to scale, as the dimensions of various features may be arbitrarily expanded or reduced for clarity. Moreover, the drawings may not depict all of the aspects and/or variants of a given system, method or apparatus admitted by the specification. Finally, like reference numerals are used to denote like features throughout the figures.